The world’s most dominant search engine is a sophisticated juggernaut of innovation, finely-tuned to deliver the most relevant, recent and comprehensive results for any user search query. It’s hard to fathom a catastrophic collapse happening any time soon, making it seemingly impossible for any other search engine to give Google a run for its money.
According to DuckDuckGo’s general counsel and head of policy, Megan Gray, this model is profitable: “We make a ton of money. We are a privately held company, so I can’t tell you exactly how much we make. But we are subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which requires at least $25 million in annual revenue, and we are well above that.”
#2 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - This is an exciting 'new entry' into the top 5 and suggests that marketers now believe they will see a return from deploying the latest AI tools supporting the many marketing applications for AI we review in this infographic. Within AI, I believe the most popular marketing applications will enhance personalization and marketing automation which brings us to...
There are a number of ways brands can use digital marketing to benefit their marketing efforts. The use of digital marketing in the digital era not only allows for brands to market their products and services, but also allows for online customer support through 24/7 services to make customers feel supported and valued. The use of social media interaction allows brands to receive both positive and negative feedback from their customers as well as determining what media platforms work well for them. As such, digital marketing has become an increased advantage for brands and businesses. It is now common for consumers to post feedback online through social media sources, blogs and websites on their experience with a product or brand.[27] It has become increasingly popular for businesses to use and encourage these conversations through their social media channels to have direct contact with the customers and manage the feedback they receive appropriately.
I find that everything you need for AdWords can be given to you by using the Adwords Campaign Management dashboard, keyword planner tool, and other search engine keyword tools. Essentially, you're looking for keywords to target on search, but instead, you're paying for it. What tools you use depends on your paid search strategy - you may want to target paid keywords that you don't / can't organically rank for (which would be a wise decision). However, if you want help chosing the best keywords and reporting on campaigns, other tools that you can use include:

The positive impact of implementing these technologies is shown by this case study showing how retailer George at ASDA boosted site speed and advanced customer engagement with PWAs and AMPs leading to 31% increase in mobile conversion since upgrading to PWA, a 1.71X faster site speed and a 32% improvement in click-through rate from organic mobile traffic for top 500 AMP queries plus a 15% increase in page views per visit. Asda has 65% of its visitors on smartphone.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's' journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom line.
We are living in the age of data abundance where people engage with brands over several channels, they consume content in an unstructured manner and do a lot of homework before making a buying decision. Predictive marketing is taking all these unstructured interactions, looking at existing positive data patterns and anticipating results accordingly.

Thanks to startups like Blutag and Jetson, businesses that sell online can now turn their product catalogues into fully fledged voice-enabled marketplaces and let their customers use their existing voice enabled devices to place orders with simple voice commands. This leads to a quick and simple customer experience by getting them to their intended results, fast.
If Jimmy’s Medical Blog (not a real site) gives some bad advice that leads to a mom poisoning her child with some amateur advice on home remedies, that’s not good for Jimmy’s brand – or Google’s reputation of delivering quality results. So as the new year progresses and SEO evolves, Google may crack down on major industries, particularly in health and finance where accurate information is critical.

AdWords is an excellent way to display your products or services on Google's results pages for very specific queries. For instance, let's say someone searches for "best CrossFit gym in Austin". Sure, you could work on your SEO and hope to appear organically -- but you can also bid on the keyword and appear at the top of the page, enabling you to capture tons of high intent visitors.